The Path of Manga

Updates on my manga work

2008-07-24T00:00:00.002-04:00

I'm back, as promised, and the calculus manga book is now completed and published. I've also moved to the Los Angeles area, and am looking forward to a new phase in my life.

The all-digital workflow that I used for this book worked beautifully. At the beginning, while I was still getting used to the Cintiq, each page was taking as much time as when I was finishing my first book. But once I got used to it, there was no comparison in terms of speed and convenience.

Also, thanks to my readers out there, my evolution manga is now on its third printing (the second printing of 1,000 lasted less than two months). I got a big boost in sales when I got it on the shelves at the gift shop of the National Science Museum in Tokyo, during the Darwin exhibit. That exhibit is now in Osaka, so I'm hoping that'll help sales too.

And now, I'm excited to see how the calculus manga will do.

But, this is only the beginning, so my next project will be to work on skills and ideas necessary to do a weekly series of fiction. I plan to become a hermit very soon...

Going on hiatus...

2007-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Taking care of our daughter, supporting my wife while she finishes her medical residency, and, of course, working on my next book, leaves very little time to do anything else. To focus on these tasks, I'm going to take a break from this blog for a while.

Making manga is not just a mental endeavor, but a physical one as well. These days, with the lack of sleep, I'm finding that I don't have enough energy left after I come home from my day job. To remedy that, I've started exercising again (I stopped when Audrey was born). Hopefully I'll get into a routine that I can keep for the long-term.

So the plan now is to finish my math manga book early next year. After that, I'll focus on improving my skills and working on ideas so I can bring them to a publisher in Japan.

I'll be back here, at this blog, to talk about the manga path again...I promise. But for now, I'll be concentrating on getting this career on track. After all, if I don't succeed in becoming a full-time mangaka, there will be no path to talk about.

Input devices useful for creating manga

2007-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Now that I've gone completely digital, my main manga tools are Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. I use two displays: a Wacom Cintiq 21UX (mentioned in a previous post) that allows me to draw directly on the screen, and a 30" Apple cinema display that is great for doing layout work.

This setup has been wonderful, but manga work on the computer can be tedious at times, and you really have to be careful about avoiding repetitive stress injuries. For that, the creative use of input devices is essential.

When you're sitting in front of a tablet monitor like the Cintiq, it's a bit harder to use your keyboard. Part of it is because the hand that's not holding the pen might be grabbing the monitor, so that if you want to type, you tend to have to look down to relocate the keys.

Now anyone who likes to work efficiently in Photoshop uses shortcut keys, if not programmed macros to simplify tedious tasks. But when you can't access the keyboard easily, all this doesn't work very well. Fortunately, the Cintiq 21UX has programmable buttons on the side so that you can access your most used commands with your free hand. But Photoshop is complicated enough that a few buttons just doesn't cut it.

Enter the NuLOOQ input device from Logitech. It's a small device that has buttons, directional and twisting controls, along with a touchpad interface (similar to the one on the iPod). But, unlike the Contour ShuttlePRO, which has many buttons that I find confusing to use for my purposes, this is simple and compact enough so that you never have to look down to figure out which button to press. I programmed this device with controls such as zooming in and out, changing brush sizes, undo and redo, scrolling in all directions, and useful modifier keys such as command, shift-command, etc.).

This device also comes with the NuLOOQ navigator software, which is a programmable popup tool. I've programmed the button on my Cintiq pen, so that when I press it, the NuLOOQ navigator pops up. I've programmed the NuLOOQ navigator so that I can access the remaining functions that I frequently use in Photoshop.

So with this programmable navigator tool accessible from my pen in my right hand, the programmable NuLOOQ input device that I use with my left hand, and the programmable buttons on the Cintiq, I can often go for long periods working on my manga without having to access the keyboard.

Pets, manga, and comics

2007-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Before Audrey came along (and still now, of course!), my wife and I have been entertained by our two Maltese dogs, Heidi and Alfie. Although at first opposed to the idea of getting pets (because I thought it would be a hassle and chain us down), once we got them, life hasn't been the same and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Having never owned such pets before, I have to admit that I was really surprised to see how much personality and hilarious individual quirks dogs can have.

Heidi

Heidi is a dog with a very broad spectrum of emotions. On the one hand, she can be super shy and demure. In fact, because she hid so much from strangers and loud sounds when she was a puppy, she got the name "Hide-y." On the other hand, when she's happy, she gets so spirited that she'll run around at a million-miles-per-hour with her tongue sticking out and will bark at and taunt a 60 pound dog (our dogs are a whopping 6 pounds each). She'll then look at you with her pretty lady eyes and sit patiently with good manners when she wants food, but, when sleeping, you'll find her sprawled out on her back.

Alfie

Alfie has always been laid back and happy. When he's alone, you can peer in from another room to find him playing with toys, kicking balls around, rolling on his back, and just having a great time. One of his favorite pastimes is to taunt and annoy his big sister, Heidi. They'll eventually get into a wrestling match, and Heidi will overpower him to the point where he'll have to run away and hide under our bed. But within a few moments, he'll relentlessly come back for seconds...and more...and more...

Characteristic poses when waiting for mommy or daddy

I now understand completely why a cartoonist would want to create characters out of their pets. Charles Schulz owned a pointer, which influenced the creation of his character, Snoopy. And Dr. Seuss had many pets, which is probably why he liked drawing cats, and drew the furry feet of his creatures like the way our Alfie's feet get when he's in dire need of a haircut.

Someday, I'll make some comics or manga about my dogs too.

The first translation of my manga!

2007-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

The Korean translation of my first manga has been made by Han Seung publishing, and it looks great (although I can't read the Korean)!

As for my second manga, it's coming along. Due to my wife's complicated pregnancy, I had taken a hiatus from this project. But I'm working hard on it again, now that Audrey has been safely born, and things have stabilized a bit. I've also started exercising again, which does help keep me at a higher energy level so that I have the stamina to work on my manga after my day job.

Audrey's been doing well, and I've been taking plenty of photos. I sold off a lens that I wasn't using, and upgraded my telephoto zoom to an image stabilized and optically superior version. So my current lineup is very functional now with the Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, EF-S 60mm f/2.8 macro, and EF 70-200mm f/4 IS on a Canon EOS 20D.

The future of manga

2007-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

While manga's popularity has been increasing steadily in the States and Europe, with translated manga filling dozens of bookshelves in major bookstores, it's been seeing a slow and steady decline in Japan, along with sales of general publications.

This is not surprising as there are increasingly more alternatives for people when it comes to hobbies. The same thing happened with plastic modeling, and, even with video games that seemed like the hottest thing a while back, we're seeing some stabilization.

One factor to this decline is the increasing desire for instant gratification. In some ways people are getting lazier, leading to the preference from the novel to manga, and now, even from manga to movies. The less work the audience has to do, the easier it is for them to be entertained. Even in America, we see comics taking on a new life and taking over Hollywood, with many of the highest grossing movies either being created from or inspired by comics and manga.

Another factor that is problematic is pirating and free use. The music and software industries suffered because of this, and now it's happening to manga. Although it has not yet become mainstream, more manga is being offered in digital formats, making it easier to copy them. Some have even started the pirating process by scanning individual manga pages themselves. Then there are problems like manga cafes, where customers can read manga to their hearts' content without paying a dime to the creators (while the manga cafes benefit from increased patronage, which is not right in terms of general business principles).

So the battle for content rights will rage on (so I hope), but one thing is certain. Without the audience somehow paying for manga, there will be no manga industry. And without an industry, there won't be much manga to read.

As for me, what matters most is that I can remain the storyteller. The final medium, in some sense, doesn't really matter, although I would like to start off in manga, which is where I can retain the most artistic control.

As for manga, if it gets too pigeon-holed into cliche roles, general interest in it as a medium will wane, and it won't have much of a future outside of pornography and fringe cultures. Manga needs to continue growing both in artistry and in its ability to express relevant human ideas, as is the mark of any good literature.

Audrey is born!

2007-05-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

On April 18th, our daughter, Audrey, was born. As a golden pig on the Chinese zodiac, she adds to our tradition of surrounding my wife with pigdom, as our dog, Heidi, eats like a pig, and our other dog, Alfie, snorts like one. I was also born a pig.

My wife had a complicated pregnancy, so the sleepless nights that followed after the birth were pretty simple in comparison. It's given me an excuse to do more photography, and Audrey, at least not yet, doesn't mind me taking pictures of her. I can't wait for the weather to get better so that I can take some fresh spring pictures of the new baby.

Of course I'm not expecting her to get deeply entrenched into Gundam plastic modeling, but I am really looking forward to all the fun activities we'll be able to do together.

Organizing Ideas

2007-04-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

That title might sound trivial, but organizing ideas is a critical part of my manga workflow. ...And, despite its importance, I have to admit, I still don’t have a great solution for it.

A mangaka needs to keep track of millions of ideas. They range from story concepts, plot structures, character developments, images of scenery, philosophical notions, business strategies, etc., etc.... Anything that comes to mind that you don’t want to forget is an idea worth jotting down. I certainly can’t trust everything to my memory, so writing things down is essential for making any progress.

All this information needs to be organized so that it’s easy to read and find. Computers are great for organizing vast amounts of information, but word processors are too bulky for the task, and having thousands of randomly placed files is not my idea of being organized. The software suited for this task seems to be the “nonlinear text editor.” The benefit of these is that each file contains hierarchically organized text files (similar to how your files are organized in the computer’s operating system), except that you can access any section by simply clicking on its name in the browser (e.g., Alepin). This is a lot simpler than double clicking files, and avoids the tedium of reorganizing windows and closing them.

Even if you have a nonlinear editor, as the amount of information grows, the organization within each file can get messy. So a certain amount of self-imposed organization is in order. The problem is that this self-imposed organization has to be flexible enough to suit the various uses (e.g., how I file away a story plot may be very different from how I organize information on a character’s development and profile), while not being too difficult to format.

Over the past decade, I’ve tried many nonlinear editors, and went as far as installing MySQL to set up a MediaWiki server. But nothing has really clicked with me yet, so I’m still looking for that ideal process. I’m currently using OmniOutliner, but am seriously considering just making my own nonlinear editing program so I can customize it to fit my needs and personal style.

If you know of any good solutions, please let me know!

Photography and manga

2007-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

I always liked taking photos, but, to be honest, I never knew what I was doing. I remember being angry at a photo lab for “losing” a roll of film I took when I climbed mount Fuji. I only realized months later that it was the roll of “night-sky photos” that I took completely underexposed (understandably, the lab guy probably thought it was an unexposed roll of film).

But about two years ago, I bought my first SLR: a Canon digital EOS 20D. I got into photography for real, and things have never been the same.

My geeky nature prevents me from just getting into photography as an artistic medium (although I do feel that, ultimately, that’s what it is). With photography, there’s unlimited potential for geeking out. Exposing the image to push the histogram to the right, so that I can push it back left in the digital realm to maximize the amount of information stored in the photo. Increasing dynamic range beyond the capabilities of the camera by stitching photos taken at different shutter speeds (high dynamic range (HDR) photography). Creating hundred-megapixel panoramic images by stitching photos taken at different angles by warping and blending images on the computer. Etc., etc.,...

Just like with manga, when you get relatively comfortable with the technical aspects of photography and you accumulate some decent equipment, you come to realize that it’s the artistry of photography, along with the persistence and time investment required to fulfill that vision, that becomes the real challenge.

Photography has also been helping out with my manga. It’s made me think more about composition and about what to do for backgrounds. It also helps me catalogue various items so that I can learn to draw them effectively. More importantly, it’s made me think more about how to capture emotion in an image and about the language of visual media.

Decent photography equipment is not cheap. But I got the OK from my “CFO” for this investment so that I could ramp up my skills to someday take nice pictures of the family. Now, two years later, I’ve improved to the point where we probably won’t have to get the services of “professional” photographers for most situations. But now I’m hooked, and the hobby has gone way past the point of taking just family photos.

Happy new year!

2007-01-01T00:00:00.001-05:00

On the Chinese animal zodiac, it’s the year of the golden pig. So that means I’ll be turning 36 this year...time really flies.

2007... George Orwell’s story of a totalitarian society takes place in the year 1984. The date in which Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” occurs has passed, and Osamu Tezuka’s classic robot, “Tetsuwan Atom,” was supposedly created in 2003. These “near future” stories are already in the past, so we’ll need to make sure there are more to come (although my first series will probably “occur” in the distant past).

As far as manga related stuff goes, this year, Adobe will come out with a new version of their graphic software suite that will run natively on my Intel Mac. I’m looking forward to that helping my projects, which will focus on finishing up the math manga book and incubating ideas for my future manga series.

But the biggest thing coming up this year, of course, will be the baby. To help preserve the memories, I’ll be getting into videography, which may also serve as baby steps towards getting into the movie industry. I will also be making use of the photography techniques I’ve been picking up over the past two years.

I’ll keep updating you with details as the year goes along.

Here’s to a great new year!

Fatherhood and exercising

2006-12-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

My wife has been pregnant with a baby girl for a few months now! Things have been quite hectic in the house to say the least, so don’t be surprised if the blog entries for the following months seem a bit random in content.

In preparation for fatherhood (also for general health and for having more stamina to work on manga), I’ve started exercising last month. Since college, I’ve gained 25 pounds so I’ll need to get into better shape soon.

Speaking of fitness, the Boston Red Sox signed on Daisuke Matsuzaka, a pitcher who’s considered a national treasure in Japan. As a Red Sox fan, I’m psyched. As a Japanese fan, I’m relieved to get a star Japanese player here in Boston because it gets tiring hearing Japanese people one-sidedly cheering on the Yankees just because of Hideki Matsui. My editor in Japan is a big fan of Mr. Matsui, who I also think is a great player and a gentleman. People in Japan seem to have forgotten about the rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees. But now a lot more people across the Pacific will be cheering on both sides of the competition.

Welcome to Boston, Mr. Matsuzaka! Go Sox!

Moving to an all-digital manga workflow

2006-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

I recently got a Wacom Cintiq 21UX, which is a computer monitor with a touch-sensitive surface. With a special stylus, you can draw directly on the screen, so unlike a pen tablet, you have the benefit of being able to see what you’re scribbling.

This means that there’s no more paper.

You don’t have to wait for the ink to dry or deal with ink smudges. You’re immune from catastrophies such as knocking over ink bottles onto your work, and there’s no need to fuss over your sweat softening the paper on a hot day, causing the pen nib to get caught or the ink to bleed.

Because all the work is done on the computer, inked drawings are as easily “erasable” as pencil. Your arms are spared the fatigue from erasing many pages worth of penciled sketches because now you can simply delete the pencil layer of your graphics file with one keystroke. The need for a scanner also disappears, along with the practical considerations of scanning, like the tedious removal of scan noise.

Archiving your work becomes easier, so long as you’re comfortable with the backup and management of digital files. You don’t have to worry about keeping stock of paper and ink and about the physical storage of your finished work.

It’s pure digital bliss.

Of course, this tool is not without its issues. For one thing, the friction between the stylus and the screen is very different from a pen nib on paper. You get a lot of friction and feedback on paper, but on the Cintiq it’s going to feel a bit slippery. You also need to keep in mind some issues when drawing at different scales. For example, if you make a curve while zoomed out, you may find that the curve is actually jagged when you zoom in. But you’ll eventually get used to these things, and sometimes even use them to your advantage. It’s truly a revolutionary tool for graphic artists.

The math manga book that I’m working on now is my first big project using the Cintiq. I’ve come up with a new all-digital workflow, so we’ll see how this goes.

So what's next?

2006-11-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

My plan after finishing the evolution manga book was to start seriously working on this fictional idea I have for a manga series. But a month after that book was published, Otsuka-san emailed and suggested that we work on another educational book. This time on a topic that will have a much higher demand. “OK,” I thought. “I still have some time before my wife finishes her medical residency. If we can hammer out this book in a reasonable amount of time, maybe I can create a financial buffer to help ease that rough transition to going full-time.”

My wife is going to let me focus on my manga work after her residency, which means I’d quit my day job to prepare for a weekly or monthly series. That also means that there’ll be no income from my side for a while, so the manga career’s gotta work out or it’s not going to be pretty (think “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”).

So the next goal will be to finish the next manga book soon and get some sales in before my wife finishes residency.

This time, it’s a manga book on math.

“Math?!” you wonder. “Who would want to read about such a horrible topic!?” That’s exactly the point. In Japan, lots of people have to study math for college entrance exams (unlike evolution, which may just be briefly discussed). Obviously, not everyone is going to have an easy time learning math, so this manga book will aim to help get those people started by focusing on the basics.

Don’t worry. I’ll keep it really simple. I promise.

The economics of the manga business

2006-11-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

OK. So now you know the direction I’m heading in, but you must be wondering about the practicalities of being a mangaka. “How does a mangaka earn a living?”

The short answer is that it doesn’t work out for most people. The sad reality is that, like novelists, just because someone is spending all his time making manga, it doesn’t mean that it’s working out financially.

To explain, let’s go over the two basic potential sources of income for a mangaka.

One source is getting paid by the page, which is dependent on your status as a mangaka and the publisher’s pay scale. $100 per page is typical, while beginners may get paid less. A superstar may earn $500 per page or more, but those cases are rare. So, at the typical rate of $100 per page, if you’re doing a monthly series at 34 pages a month or a weekly series at 17 pages a week, you’ll be earning about $40,000 to $90,000 a year. That’s really not much, considering that you’ll probably be working as hard as a busy surgeon.

The other source is royalties. This is what separates the successful mangaka from those that falter. For starters, a popular manga will get compiled into manga volumes, 10% of whose sales goes to the mangaka. The most popular manga may sell a million copies or so per volume over its lifetime. So considering that the weekly series pace produces about 4 books a year, if your manga’s popular, you’ll be doing well.

Then there are royalties from movies, anime, pachinko machines, and other products. This sounds good, but you have to keep in mind that just because a manga is popular, it doesn’t mean that it’ll be animated or made into products. The television studios have to expect a certain amount of viewership, and the secondary products need to be marketable. Ultimately, the biproducts, whether they’re anime or toys, need to sell.

The reality is that most manga don’t get any extra commercialization, so the income ends up being only the per-page fees and royalties from the books. Of those, many will never get published in compilations because they aren’t popular enough, so the mangaka is stuck with his $40,000-$90,000 income.

You might be thinking, “Hey, even if you’re working like a dog, if you like what you’re doing, that’s not bad.” But here’s the catch. A mangaka needs assistants. Some get by with none, but for a weekly, you’ll often see 4 or more people helping out with the fast 17-pages-per-week pace. Remember, it’s not just that you have to draw 17 pages, but you also have to come up with the story and dialog. In addition, you’ll need to ramp up the pace even more to offset the occasional rejection from your editor who says that an entire episode needs to be redone for whatever reason.

You may be able to find some assistants who are happy to work for a low wage or for free (for the sake of gaining experience or padding their resumes), but eventually you’ll want to pay an amount that allows you to get consistent quality and dependable work hours. So if your manga isn’t popular, you’re either blowing all your per-page fees on assistants or are killing yourself by pulling off all-nighters to make the deadlines. That’s why this business doesn’t work out for most people, and is a serious concern for the future health of the industry.

Being a mangaka is essentially the same as owning your own business. You hone your skills and create a product that you then market and commercialize. You hire workers to help, but unlike in academia, there’s no such thing as tenure. If the audience doesn’t like your stuff, you become unemployed the next day. And just because you’ve had one hit, doesn’t mean you’re set for life. I’ve seen some established mangaka have trouble getting their next hit, and sometimes just end up becoming one-hit wonders.

You really have to love writing stories and drawing manga, as you’ll be working far harder than most jobs require you to. I love manga and making them, but it also has to work out financially. So my mid-term goal is to get that first big hit...

My plans for becoming a full-time mangaka

2006-10-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

Since the middle of grad school, I had been thinking of how to actually go about making manga. To be honest, I had no idea where to start.

It wasn’t the drawing part that puzzled me, because I figured practice would make me better and faster. It was the story writing that I had questions on, like “what should I write about?” and “how do I make a story?” They’re actually profound questions, but it’s sort of sad when a to-be writer has no clue about these things. Having been a “science type” for much of my life, I tended to ignore those literature classes in the past.

In any case, after much thought and reading, I’ve found my answers (and more), to many of those questions. Now I have to consider how I want to go about actually pursuing this path.

So what’s involved in being a full-time mangaka?

Mangaka come in a variety of flavors. There are those that work for hire. Perhaps a novelist has a script ready and a publisher needs someone to make it into a one-off manga book. Some mangaka do it for fun and sell photocopies of their work in underground markets. But what most people think of when they hear the term mangaka is those who make a living by authoring weekly or monthly series of fiction.

These fictional series are the most highly publicized manga in Japan, and generally reach the widest audience. They are published in thick 200 to 400 page newsprint magazines that each have weekly (or monthly) circulations ranging from 10,000 to 3,000,000. One of the benefits of getting published in a popular magazine is that the marketing is done automatically. Any reader who picks up a magazine will at least get a glimpse of your work, even if they weren’t originally intending on reading it.

Doing a weekly or monthly is what I eventually want to do, so I’m currently working on plans, drawing styles, and a story for such a series (more on that later).

So how does one begin this path towards becoming such a mangaka? Many people start out as assistants to established mangaka. Others might enter short story competitions in manga magazines and get noticed by editors through them (that was my initial plan, before making my Darwin book). Although I’ve published one book, I still consider myself a rookie because I haven’t worked on a series, which is where the requirements get really tough. You need great ideas and the ability to make cutting edge manga to attract and retain a large readership...all that while maintaining a rapid pace and not skipping a beat.

In any case, my plan is to do a mochikomi, which is like a job interview where you bring in some samples of your work to an editor. Most of the time this simply results in some recommendations for improvement. But if the editor likes your work, he may suggest starting a series on that sample or some other idea appropriate to the magazine.

It sounds like once you have a successful series, things become easier despite the crazy pace. A typical mangaka at a popular magazine might have an editor working exclusively with him. The most popular authors may even have a staff of 5 or more editors, who help out with not just editing but also with the ideas and the dialog. Also, once you have a successful series, it’s easier to justify the hiring of many assistants to help out with the creation of the pages, allowing you to focus more on the ideas and stories.

The tough part is how to get to that stage, which is what I’m trying to figure out now.

My first major milestone

2006-10-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

When I was halfway through the drawing phase of the manga on evolution, I felt for the first time that I had some momentum going. As the months flew by, “half-done” became “three-quarters done,” which then became “seven-eighths,” and so on... Once finished with the draft, my editor and I went through an editing phase that took another few months. This was the home stretch, and the anticipation made it a very exciting time. I also made the graphics for the cover, and we decided on details like the thickness of the paper to print on. After hammering out some technical issues preparing the final version of the files, my editor zapped the data over to the press.

Less than a month later, on May 20th of 2005, the book was printed, and soonafter was on bookstore shelves in Japan.

Wow!! What a relief! I decided to give myself a break. Instead of working on manga after my day job, I now had free time. It felt like a vacation. At first I didn’t know what to do with myself, and got really impatient and cranky. But I eventually learned to relax. I treated myself to an Xbox and played Halo 2, watched the Red Sox on TV, and tinkered with some Gundam plastic models.

Of course, I’ve been checking the Amazon Japan rankings every day, even though people recommend not doing that because it’s not a very meaningful gauge of sales and it’ll become an unhealthy addiction. In any case, the book is doing quite well. When it first got out, it was number 1 in the evolution related books on Amazon Japan (out of around 340). Now, it’s usually hovering around the top 20, so it’s selling competitively amongst evolution books. I’ve also seen a lot of praise from professors of medicine and biology in their blogs, and it’s been recommended as supplemental reading in a number of introductory college science classes.

The book got a chance of becoming a bit more international when a few publishing companies from Korea showed interest in translating it. I chose one that focuses on science books, so the translation should be coming out pretty soon.

“So what’s the book about again, exactly?” you ask. It’s about Darwin and his theory of evolution. The beginning of the book focuses on his voyage on the Beagle, and how he came up with his theory and struggled to publish his results. That’s followed by explanations of the theory itself and its scientific implications. The rest of the book goes into recent discoveries related to evolution, touching upon scientific advances like genetics, radioactive dating, modern medicine, genomics, and virology.

Buy a copy from Amazon Japan!

The costs and benefits of changing career paths

2006-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

Many mangaka start out in their early twenties, if not in their late teens. It’s easier to manage crazy things when you’re young, like pulling off a few all-nighters a week, which may be necessary for a mangaka who’s just beginning his career. And that doesn’t take into account the time constraints you’ll have to balance with if you have a family.

I’m definitely not typical. I was already 27 by the time I finished school and started working on my first significant work. There are mangaka who started later than this, but I’m definitely on the older side. So I like to remind myself that Van Gogh decided to become a painter at the age of 27, and Beethoven’s music only got better as he got older (and that's despite his loss of hearing).

But this raises a question that people sometimes ask: Did my education go to waste?

Well, for starters, I can think a lot more clearly about things than I could before. Physics trains you to think in ways that help you cut through problems in many disciplines, and it’s certainly been helping me as I bumble along my manga path. As I explained in a previous posting, authoring manga requires so many different skills that it’s really helpful if you can do a lot of the learning on your own.

Learning on your own is just like doing scientific research. You have to figure out what people have done in the past, develop your own vision, and invent any necessary skills or techniques you need to accomplish those goals. On a lighter note, I also enjoy the common aspect of buying equipment like faster computers, but the CFO (my wife) reminds me that she’d like to see some returns on our investments for a change. “Ouch!”

One of the questions that people often asked of the great mangaka, Shotaro Ishinomori, was “How much education should a mangaka get?” He would reply, “As much as possible. Having more knowledge will provide you with many more interesting perspectives when looking at things, which will give you a big edge.”

But for me, finishing up my education probably had more personal than practical relevance. Successfully pushing through grad school gave me the confidence to take on tougher challenges and stick with them. Also, if I hadn’t finished, at some point I’d probably start wondering if going into academics was the thing to do. Then instead of just being that physicist doodling in class to the frustration of his professors, I’d also be the mangaka scribbling equations while his editors get annoyed. But now I know that the “road not taken” was deliberately not taken, so I can whole-heartedly commit myself to my new goals.

Telecommuting between the United States and Japan

2006-09-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

When I was in college and toying with the idea of becoming a mangaka, I thought that with the convenience of fax machines, FedEx, and low-rate international calling plans, I could probably manage to work on my manga in the states with editors stationed in Japan.

Things got a lot more convenient by the time it mattered.

From the moment I started working with my editor in Japan on the Darwin manga book, we communicated via emails. At times, we would talk over the phone, but email fit the bill (and my budget). This worked out particularly well because after I’d come home from my day job, I’d grab some dinner, and by the time I got to work on my manga, the work day would have just started in Japan.

Sending files over the internet only got more convenient as internet traffic speeds increased. At the beginning, I only sent text files containing outlines and scripts. When I got to the drawing phase, each page that I sent for content checking was compressed to 1 to 3 megabytes. The final black and white half-toned images sent to the printing press were even smaller, despite their resolution being 2400 dots-per-inch, so the files were never too big (although the cover illustration files were quite large and a bit more of a hassle to deal with).

The only time we found snail mail to be more convenient was when Otsuka-san was editing the final proofs. Instead of doing it online, he’d print out the pages, mark them up in red and mail them over.

So from beginning to end, we were able to do most of our business over the internet. But still, I flew over to Japan a couple of times over the course of the project to meet with my editor. After all, you eventually want to put a face on that virtual person across the internet, and there’s no better way of getting to know each other than to meet in person.

At one of those meetings, my editor introduced me to Shimizu-san, an editor of manga (Otsuka-san edits science books). I was a bit nervous because Shimizu-san was the vice editor in chief of that big-time weekly manga magazine, Shonen Magazine. My nervousness was completely unfounded, as he turned out to be very friendly and encouraging, and gave me a lot of useful advice. For example, “If something’s annoying or boring for you to draw, it’s probably annoying or boring for the reader to read it,” is something very useful that I keep in mind every time I draw, to this day.

Shimizu-san is unfortunately no longer with us, as he passed away of a stroke. He has a great legacy of having positively influenced many mangaka. I always carry around advice from people like him and my father, so it’s my hope that I can keep some of their influences living on in my works.

Artistic tendencies and plastic modeling

2006-09-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve been in the sciences almost all my life, but a path in the arts is not altogether strange.

Since I was a kid, I can always remember sneaking in creative projects when I should have been working on homework. When I wasn’t being a geeky scientist type, I was definitely that stereotypically doodling or daydreaming student who people wondered if he should be a cartoonist instead.

It wasn’t just drawing that I liked, though. In fact, back then, I was probably more into making things.

Here’s something I did for fun one winter weekend during grad school. I had heard that Chinese artists used to paint the insides of glass spheres with paint brushes consisting of only two hairs. So I gave that a try with a clear glass Christmas ornament. I chose as my subject one of my favorite characters, Joe Shimamura, from Shotaro Ishinomori’s classic manga, Cyborg 009. I used toothpicks and carefully added animation paint through the hole where the hook attachment goes in at the top. Because you’re looking at the paint applied to a smooth surface, it looks as if it were a polished stone.

One of my hobbies is plastic modeling. I used to make plastic models in my early teens, back when I was so clueless that I’d try to wash lacquer paint off of paintbrushes with water, and airbrush paint without thinning it. (You modelers out there know how ineffective that’d be!)

In any case, I got back into plastic modeling during grad school (notice the pattern?), and tried my hand at scratch building the mecha, Palace Athene (no, that’s not a typo), from the anime series Z Gundam. Normally, with plastic modeling, you’d buy a kit that comes in many parts that you’d glue together and paint. For a full-scratch build, the pieces are hand-made, carved out from polyester putty and polystyrene sheets. And, where needed, duplicates of the pieces are made by casting polyurethane resin in silicon rubber molds.

Like any project, it helps to have a deadline, so I decided to make this for submission to the national Orazaku competition sponsored by Hobby Japan magazine. I remember getting really frustrated at times with the difficulty of crafting certain pieces or the engineering of the joints. I also had to rush through the paint job in one frantic all-nighter so that I could make the deadline. But in the end, it did pretty well, managing to win third place out of eight hundred or so entries. One of the judges, who was the editor responsible for overseeing Gundam stuff in Hobby Japan, liked it so much he featured it in a Gundam Weapons book and asked if I’d like to write some articles for them. But that didn’t pan out because I really had to finish grad school in some reasonable amount of time.

Now that I’m working, I can afford to buy the plastic model kits. But these days, having no time for these extra projects, I’ve become a stack’em up modeler who uses more closet space than his wife. (She’s not too happy about this.) But, getting back to topic, I need to get this manga career off the ground, so it’s bye-bye to Gundam plastic models for the time being.

How my first manga book was made

2006-09-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

Creating a manga book has a lot in common with other tasks like writing computer software, conducting scientific experiments, or painting a detailed picture. You generally have to do a lot of planning before doing anything that’ll be part of the final work.

So for an educational manga book, that means that before you do any of the drawings, you first need to figure out what exactly you want to put into the book. You might ask if this takes away the spontaneous creativity needed in art. To some extent, yes, but making an educational book is a complicated enough process that you’ll benefit much more from mapping things out to make sure the book makes sense as a whole. Small details can be changed later, but the more you have things planned out, the less likely you’ll have costly mistakes from which you can’t recover.

For the manga Darwin book, I first started by brainstorming ideas for content and figuring out what I wanted to accomplish with the project: Who’s the audience, what would they like to know, and what would be the best way to explain these things. This would then be turned into an outline that I’d flesh out with lots of researched material.

Now if this were a regular book, I’d be done with a little editing. But because this is manga, I still had to convert all the material into drawings. This meant that I had to rework it to flow with dialog and humor so it won’t look like I was just adding illustrations as an afterthought. The researched material takes its final form as a script that specifies what’s shown in each frame and who’s saying what. It’s only after that’s done that I can actually start the drawing phase.

As far as the actual drawing of the pages is concerned, my first manga book was made in a semitraditional way. Using a thick paper meant for manga, I sketched out the drawings and frames with a pencil. Once I was satisfied with the drawings, I’d ink with a pen nib. After waiting for the ink to dry, I’d erase all the pencil lines and scan the inked page. Finally, on my Mac (yes, I’m an Apple fan) I’d typeset the text and add shading, frames, touch-ups, and any special effects using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

Once a page is done, I would make a compressed low-resolution file and email it to my editor who would check it for content. When this is done for all 205 pages of the book, my editor and I would go through a couple of editing passes before sending them to the printing company. One of the subtle things I caught during these editing sessions was the inconsistent number of fingers on Darwin’s hand (at first he’d have four and later only three). I also noticed that my Photoshop use improved over the course of the book so I made some tweaks in the final stages to equalize the look throughout the book.

So that’s how the first book was made. The overall process used is pretty general, so it’ll essentially be the same one that I’ll use in the future. Going forward, though, instead of paper and ink, I’ll be doing everything on the computer in an all-digital workflow, so that’ll be a lot of fun!

Manga, anime, and movies

2006-09-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

Many people I talk to seem to confuse manga with anime. I get comments like “You gotta show us some stills” or “How’s your anime going?” I realize these people are simply trying to make conversation, given that they’re not necessarily into this stuff, but still...

Manga is printed Japanese comics. Anime is Japanese animation that you see on TV or in the movie theaters. They both tell stories, but the business models are completely different, like the way a novelist usually has nothing directly to do with movie production.

Don’t get me wrong. I love anime too. My favorites include Galaxy Express 999, Space Cruiser Yamato, Gundam, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

But if you want to be the creative force behind a work, being a mangaka has certain benefits. To make manga, you don’t need tens of millions of dollars and the large staff that’s required to make anime or large scale movies. This works out better for me because I don’t have tens of millions of dollars, and, more importantly, it’s easier for me to keep control over my stories. The reality is that unless you own an entire production studio like Hayao Miyazaki, the anime industry is usually not where you can be very creative. Most anime studios just take popular manga and make animated versions of them. So making anime is often just a tedious process of having to make thousands of frames of animation just for one episode. For manga, all you need is a pen, ink, and some paper (these days you might use a computer with decent software, but more on that later).

Being a mangaka gives you a lot of artistic freedom, but the flipside is that it requires a lot of skills. In some sense, a mangaka has to perform all the roles in the credits of a movie. You have to come up with an original story concept, work it into episodes, and polish it with convincing dialog as if you’re the novelist or screen writer. But it doesn’t stop there, as any visuals will have to be hammered out on your own. What do the characters look like (casting)? What are they wearing (costume design)? The world needs to be modeled (sets and props), and when you’re drawing, how you expose the story (directing and editing) and how you visually convey the story (cinematography) are all up to you.

It’s a big challenge, but that’s part of what makes it fun. Someday, when I’m much further along my manga path, I’d like to try my hand at movies. Entertainment in the form of printed media is facing tough competition from many areas (the internet and video games, to name just a few), so adaptability will be key to anyone’s artistic survival.

A manga on Darwin and his theory of evolution

2006-08-28T00:00:00.000-04:00

It was a wonderful turn of events that Otsuka-san from Kodansha Scientific had contacted me, because that allowed for a very natural transition to manga. I had already resigned myself to having an awkward and bumpy transition, because my background is very academic and in a totally unrelated field (I went to Harvard for college and MIT for a Ph. D. in physics). But it ended up that my science background would be what would make Otsuka-san give me a try after reading about me in the paper. On the surface it might seem like he’s crazy for picking up a person with no experience, but I’m grateful that he took that risk.

So when Otsuka-san gave me the reins to the project, I suggested that we make a manga about Darwin and his theory of evolution. I chose this because I remembered a conversation I had decades ago with my grandfather (a chemistry professor) who said that there are four great classic works in science. There’s the Traité Elémentaire de Chimie by Lavoisier, the Principia by Newton, The Origin of Species by Darwin, and...I forgot what the fourth is. Oh well, anyway, I love biology and thought that’d be a cool topic.

And so we began that project.

I was already OK at drawing, but when you actually sit down and try to make manga as a beginner, you realize how little you know and get stuck on pretty much everything. How do you organize the manga frames, and how does the choice of their contents change the reader’s experience? What kind of style do I want to draw this in? What about the tone of speech of the various characters? What about the period costumes? How do I draw this and that? What kind of character designs would be appropriate? Etc., etc. Lots of considerations.

There were some subtle but practical considerations too. If you’ve ever read manga or comics, you’ve probably noticed that in some long running series, the mangaka’s drawing style may evolve due to changes in his habits or taste. Sometimes you see characters getting shorter, probably because it allows the mangaka to more easily fit them in the frames and fully articulate expressions using the entire body (this happened in Dr. Slump and Orewa Teppei). Well, in my case, I knew I’d improve over the course of 220 pages, so I decided to start working from somewhere in the middle of the book. That way, people don’t have to get shocked with my worst work on the first page.

In any case, this first project took a bit over four years to complete. One of the reasons was that I had never written anything in Japanese other than letters to my relatives when I was a kid. The book was also about Darwin’s biography mixed in with some history and modern scientific concepts and facts, so researching the content and deciding what to use from the sea of material took extra time.

But my manga skills did improve a lot because of these struggles. At the beginning, character designs took weeks until I came up with something satisfactory, but near the end, I could look at a portrait and caricaturize it on the spot. The first page I sent to my editor took an entire week to complete, but by the end of the project, I remember once finishing 8 pages in 6 days (and that's with a regular day job).

Someday, I hope to be able to make images appear by willing them into existence. I think I still have a ways to go...

In later posts, I’ll talk about how I went about creating this manga book and how my editor and I managed to work together despite being on opposite sides of the earth.

Why manga?

2006-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00

Good question. At this point, you’re probably wondering what got me interested in manga in the first place.

I was born in Tokyo, but when my father took a position at MIT, my family moved to Boston, which is where we’ve been ever since. I was still a baby when we came over, so I don’t remember anything of my birthplace. But we spoke Japanese at home, so even my first word, hikouki (airplane), was in Japanese.

It was on a visit to New York City, when I was just a few years old, that I had my first encounter with manga. New York has always had a large Japanese population, so it’s been home to several Japanese bookstores at any given time as far as I can remember. That’s where I discovered and became engrossed in the classic children's manga, Doraemon, and picture books about Japanese folktales, Nihon Mukashibanashi. These days I can get all my Japanese books online, but, back then, the highlights of many travels was visiting Japanese bookstores in major cities like Paris, Dusseldorf, and, of course, Tokyo. For me, those childhood memories seem to have permanently associated bookstores with treasure hunting and manga with treasure.

My ability to speak, read, and write in Japanese owes many thanks to manga and to my parents and grandparents who never hesitated to get me access to these books.

Essentially, I grew up with manga, and always admired the medium for its accessibility and entertainment value. My favorites include Cyborg 009, Black Jack, Orewa Teppei, and Fist of the North Star. I’ve also been heavily inspired by some of the Chinese literature classics like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Outlaws of the Marsh.

Manga is a well established medium in Japan, as can be seen from the fact that a third of printed books is manga. Men, women, and kids of all ages read manga because there’s not a genre that hasn’t been covered. Erotic manga is very popular (what, you thought manga would be any different?), and you’ll find manga from the most typical of topics such as sports, action adventure, and romantic comedies, to the esoteric, such as competitive sushi cuisine. This is very different from the states, where although superhero movies have been extremely big recently (I loved Spiderman 2 and Batman Begins!), the comic book industry has become relatively minor.

So my strategy is to start out in Japan where the market is much larger and the business models are well established for mangaka to head their own business. That way I can concentrate on my manga and not have to spend too much time promoting my work.

As a child, I was encouraged by my father to do what only I can do. Now that I’m trying to find my own path, I hope to stay true to that guide. The way I see it, individually, we’re all unique in our genetic makeup and our life’s experiences. But whether someone ultimately does what only that person can do depends on what that person ends up doing with his uniqueness.

Tragedy and an unexpected gift from heaven

2006-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

With only a couple of weeks remaining before my graduation ceremony, my father passed away of a heart attack, at the young age of 54.

Having grown up in a safe and sheltered environment, I was dealt my first major shock in life. My father was a physicist, which is one of the reasons why I went on that path. Since the time I was a kid, he and I had worked on many projects together, and, as a person who worked passionately on his ideas, he understood well the need for me to switch careers and pursue what’s ultimately most meaningful to me.

I thought grad school was tough (especially after deciding not to continue on that path) and that everything would be rosy once I was done with it, but it ended up being a hard time that followed for our family. It also reemphasized the importance of making the most out of life, as it is a limited time that is given to each of us.

But then, a little miracle happened. I got an email from Otsuka-san, an editor in the science department at Kodansha (a large publishing company in Japan), asking me if I wanted to work on some science books together. It turns out that he had read my father’s obituary (my father being a prominent scientist) in the Asahi newspaper that included a little blurb about me. Earlier, the writer of the obituary thought my career change kind of curious, so had interviewed me on my manga aspirations and included that in the writeup. Who knew that this would actually make a connection!

At first Otsuka-san asked that I do a dozen illustrations for a new science book series he’s starting. I said I’d be more than happy to do that. I figured this would be a great way to get some practice and start building up a portfolio. Then he asked if I had any samples of my work that he could check out.

I’m thinking, “Uh oh...”

Now I’m getting nervous. I’ve been stuck in the lab for the past seven years so I hadn’t done much in terms of drawing for a while. In a panicked frenzy, I made a few pages of what I thought would be found in a book on evolution and emailed them to him.

His reply was positive, and suggested that we skip the illustrations thing and do a 220 page all-manga science book. He added that I can choose the topic and come up with the content.

I was floored. I had never even made a 17 page manga short story. The last time I even drew a few pictures in sequence was probably a decade ago, sometime in college. But not willing to pass up a great opportunity, I said with acted confidence,

“No problem!”

This was definitely an answer first, worry about it later kind of situation. Thus started my first major project.

Reporting from the path of manga

2006-08-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve always wanted to be a mangaka (manga author) since the age of five. Typical, right?

It didn’t end up being that simple.

It’s because I’ve also wanted to be a scientist since the same age. I love nature, math, designing and building stuff, computers, and generally geeky things. So I ended up pursuing a track in physics.

Before I knew it, I found myself in grad school. But halfway through the program, in my mid-twenties, I realized something about myself that’s really important. Now you might be thinking, “why the heck did it take you so long to realize something so important?” Well, you might remember from biology class that more complex organisms tend to take longer to mature. So if it takes an amoeba two days to split in two, a mosquito a couple of weeks, and a chimpanzee twelve years, I think I’m starting to look pretty good.

In any case, what I realized was that as much as I like science, I didn’t like always being cooped up in the lab. I had this nagging suspicion that the answers to many of life’s questions couldn’t be found there, and that I needed to get my “data points” from a larger world, so to speak.

I also felt that although making progress in science is a creative process, it wasn’t using all of my artistic skills. On the other hand, drawing pictures or making plastic models (I’ll get into that later) may be more artistic, but I didn’t find them to be that intellectually stimulating by themselves. I wanted to do something that was truly meaningful and would leave a lasting impression on people, while tapping into as many of my skills and interests as possible. Finally, after a lot of soul searching, I decided to become a mangaka, so I could pursue my ideas while expressing them to others in the form of visual stories.

Soon after, I became that stereotypical guy who’s always doodling or daydreaming in the wrong place. Alright, maybe I was always like that, except now we can consider it official. Despite that, I eventually managed to finish grad school. I picked up a day job at a nearby software company called the MathWorks, and worked on my manga projects at night. I must admit it’s not the most efficient way to work on manga ideas and improving skills, but dreams alone can’t pay the bills. So until the day my manga brings in a reasonable income, I take consolation by reminding myself that “every superhero needs a day job.”

Well, that’s how it began. I’ll continue with how things turned out since changing career paths. Once we’re done with the history, I’ll start posting real-time updates.

In case you prefer reading in Japanese or are interested in the language, I’ll be keeping a Japanese version of this blog updated in parallel here.

I look forward to sharing my experiences with you!